


Moments of Transition

by EmmG



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Freeform, alternate endings, not really drabbles but kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 21:25:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6724111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmmG/pseuds/EmmG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are many moments when Solas could have found himself on a different path. A study of possibilities in words and definitions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moments of Transition

**devotion**

_(love, loyalty, or enthusiasm for a person, activity, or cause)_

He sees her.

Past the human shell she wears and self-inflicted constraints meant to defy mortality. He sees a glimmer of pale blue and cherry red—gentle eyes and careful mouth, or lack thereof. He feels the warmth of her embrace and allows himself to crumble within the circle of her arms.

It has been too long and he is tired of this crushing loneliness.

"Old friend," Mythal—Flemeth—this chimera of a different kind says, soothing him, and he takes the bait even when knowing it won't last.

He tells her of his failures. She smiles as if his shame is worth naught. She sits back and cracks one knuckle, then a second. The gesture isn't hers.

"I will go," she says, "and you will not follow."

"The People," he whispers, but never finishes.

"I have a daughter now," Mythal says, gaze turning wistful. "She is not truly mine, and yet she is."

Bitter, proud Morrigan. Yes, he remembers.

"She is not yours," he voices what has already been said.

"Neither were those before her; not by blood but certainly by carefully planned circumstances." She touches her hair—white rather than the shade of honey and hay. "We share a heart."

"I have a duty," he says.

"You owe me nothing, and the People do not need you. Retreat, Old Wolf, do not come back for me. I will love my curious child from afar in this shattered world that needs no mending. I need no more. Dareth shiral."

She kisses him softly on the cheek, once again slipping through his fingers, and he realizes he no longer has anyone to gift his poisonous loyalty to.

No one at all, and he is alone and unloved. One home he left in the past and the other burned all bridges toward.

He wishes for his leash back.

 

 

**silliness**

_(a ludicrous folly)_

 

He holds her hands and calls her beautiful.

And he is glad that his face is a mask, his tone ever composed, for she might flee if she were to ever peer behind the facade. Glimpse the truth that he wishes to affix himself to her very being until the only reality left is the one she exudes.

I am sorry, he thinks but does not say it.

Not yet, not yet.

Lavellan laughs, catching sight of her bare face in the water's surface. Dirthamen's elegant strokes no longer defile her features.

"Why do you laugh?" he asks.

"Because you taste of pastries," she says. "This late? Such unhealthy habits, ma'lath."

He loses ground.

He smiles.

He thinks of the sugar that's slipped between the cracks of his lips—miraculously stolen by her tongue—and of little else.

He doesn't talk.

 

 

**revelation**

_(a surprising and previously unknown fact)_

The Well of Sorrows isn't kind.

Her hands are on either side of her head as she grimaces in pain. Too much knowledge crammed into a fragile vessel; she will not endure.

She will fracture before he has the time to mend the hairline cracks.

When she looks at him, she knows.

When Mythal's Sentinel takes her aside, she bows her head and accepts his words in silence.

He doesn't flee and she doesn't speak. He dares not take her hand.

When the Templars come from him, he turns to memorize his abstract depiction of her form upon the rotunda's walls.

She will not smile like that for him again.

 

 

**hesitation**

_(the action of pausing or hesitating before saying or doing something)_

 

It devours her.

His power, a beast untamed. It sings for him when he touches her, but all he wishes for is quiet.

The petrified Qunari at her back; the thrumming eluvian at his.

She doesn't flee; she was always the one who followed.

He takes the Anchor and she clutches at his sleeve—his gauntlet. He isn't soft anymore. Not even for her.

"Don't be alone," she says. "I can't let you."

I can't let you, she says, I can't let you, she thinks. Her mouth shapes one truth while her mind conjures another. She doesn't understand herself, not yet, and neither does he.

He isn't selfless. He takes what she offers gladly and helps her to her feet. She doesn't look back even though he knows she longs to.

There are faces there, past the inactive glass he tricked her into stepping through, that from now on will belong to the past. Exist in memories alone. That, too, he takes from her along with her arm and two years of silence.

He wonders if she'll mourn alone or allow him to join when the time comes.

But for now, as his fingers undo the fastenings of her armor and his lips trail along the valley between her breasts, he hesitates.

 

 

**routine**

_(a sequence of actions regularly followed)_

His fingers catch on a knot. Her hair is soft and short, yet ever so tangled.

There is nothing of him in her; no dormant spark of magic, no familiar quirk of character, no shared features. Her eyes are not blue and her hair devoid of the barest hint of red as his is now, fully grown-out, but she is wholly his.

She belongs to this time, and he cannot sink his claws deep enough to keep her.

"Be still, little heart," he chides, capturing the child with one arm. She huffs into the crook of his elbow before giving pause to the nervous energy within her.

He goes back to braiding her hair, fully aware the pale strands will fly loose and he'll have to weave them again in a matter of hours.

"Perhaps you can do mine after," Lavellan teases.

"Perhaps," he replies, smiling.

Right here, he is just papae to one, vhenan to the other. Ever the apostate and nothing more. Such a lovely role.

He watches his daughter and the woman who loves him in a lie, always counting down the years they have left in a world where the Veil still suffocates the sky.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also kind-of-sort-of on [tumblr](http://emmg.tumblr.com/) where I *occasionally* post some writing and *very often* reblog stuff I find hilarious (so yes, a very useful corner of the internet and the Solavellan hell.)


End file.
